“Dispatches from Beirut,” by Nadia Bou Ali, is a Communis original feature.
“It is only from the negative that a world otherwise may erupt into existence, not through a cruel attachment to lost hopes, but in a staying with the collapse of all transcendentals: no sublime, no illusion, only a staying with the broken middle, a remaining with the negative. Despite the loud holler of the maddah, the lament of the narrator, the experience of anti-colonial struggle rings in the silence, the bearing of the unbearable, the unspeakable.”
— Nadia Bou Ali
Optimism in The Current Anti-Colonial Struggle
The new force of colonization is unlike its past; there is no interest in understanding the colonized or even claiming that they require enlightenment. It is rather very simple today: there is only elimination, all the hubris of co-existence, or tolerance, of the laws of conversion have fallen. Eliminate, conquer, dominate, without recourse to further adjudication. There exists of course an ideological arsenal for the said domination, which, however, is no longer worthy of ideology critique. There is no veil of appearance to puncture nor to represent, only the brutality of war and mass killing. There is not much to be gained from historical analysis, history presents its limits, appears banal in the face of structure. Rewriting the history of colonization, its postcolonial afterlives and decolonial failures adds very little to the experience of brute force that people in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Egypt, Iran and just about everywhere outside the new imperialist alliance are faced with. There is no need for explaining the force of domination, what is enigmatic or requires sitting with is rather the resistance, the persistence in the face of annihilation. Why do people resist? Resist the telos, the determinism of historical experience, the fate of subjugation. The staying with, staying alive despite all the seductions of a comfortable death, a giving up, a recalcitrance to the return to the state of pure rest that demands analysis. Much ink is spent analyzing the psychical mechanisms of domination, of force and power and mastery, yet there is less patience with the obtuseness of staying with where pain refuses to soften. Keeping vigil with the unbearable, enduring the night where all the cows are black.
Why in the face of displacement, dispossession, loss of dignity, and prolonged humiliation carry on, withstand subjugation? We would be too quick to dismiss these phenomena as forms of cruel attachments, being tethered to the cart of alienation, bound to putrid identities that sit on the chest of the living like an Alp or a nightmare from which they cannot emerge. Identity here is rather an epiphenomenon, not only in Fanonian terms of epidermalization but more so in the sense of foam on ocean waves. It is a reverse romanticism that may be at play here: dying for the sake of an imagined community that cannot be actualized, as a principle, is unlike dying for a nation that has purchase on the past and future, an eternal ideal that blocks Sittlichkeit from its becoming. What exactly is romanticism in reverse? An aesthetics of disillusion perhaps, a suspension of authenticity played out as one appears to inhabit some form of authentic belonging. The enjoyment of pulverizing belonging, one that we have been privy to much too often in Zionist propaganda, has an underbelly: the erasure of a topography of belonging belies a disavowed fantasy harbored by the colonizer, one that the abject, the homeless, traverse and inhabit with courage. Courage is precisely what emerges at the site of failures of disavowal, courage sticks in a way that enjoyment envies.
There is no veil of appearance to puncture nor to represent, only the brutality of war and mass killing. There is no need for explaining the force of domination, what requires sitting with is rather the resistance in the face of annihilation.
Melancholic attachments, lament as belonging, are not the same as belonging to a biopolitical organon of death, a Leviathan of force that is at once dead and a machine of death. The difference is not tangential: Fanon captured something crucial about anti-colonial struggle, the struggle is at once against the self and against the other. The million plus displaced in Lebanon today are set up to precisely this form of struggle. The struggle against the oppression of colonial extermination, and the struggle against the deep attachment to home, to the familiar, the family… the poetics of space beggars a belonging. The topography of the soul is tethered to spaces, to homes, houses, gardens, olive groves, pastures, but also eventually to the trunk of a car, a nomadic landscape, a homelessness of despair that can live with the ruination of form in a way that rattles our petit bourgeois comforts.
Belonging in displacement recedes to the past, must be negated, only for life to continue on the sidewalk, on the beaches and water fronts, in the public schools that offer a shelter of utter abandonment. These conditions of abjection harbor an optimism: it is only from the negative that a world otherwise may erupt into existence, not through a cruel attachment to lost hopes, but in a staying with the collapse of all transcendentals: no sublime, no illusion, only a staying with the broken middle, a remaining with the negative. Despite the loud holler of the maddah, the lament of the narrator, the experience of anti-colonial struggle rings in the silence, the bearing of the unbearable, the unspeakable. This is what we are called to be in fidelity to.
Featured image: Boy playing among ruins. Free Stock Photo by Soner Arkan. Courtesy of Pexels.
